When I turn on my Macbook, only a blue screen appears with no Dock or info in the menu bar

When I went to turn on my Macbook OS X today, only a blue background showed up. For some reason the only program that opened was Bittorrent and besides that in the menu bar at the top there is nothing on the screen. The dock wont appear even if I hold my mouse down over where it should be. There is no time display in the menu bar. I can open single applications at a time by clicking on the apple icon in the left corner of the menu bar and selecting "recent items" but other than that nothing else works. When I go into "system preferences" and try to click different display options for the dock and menu bar such as the clock, it won't let me select it.
I tired booting up the computer in "safe mode" and everything was fine, but then when I went to do a regular start up the same problem occurred.
Has any one else seen this problem.

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